The Trail of Fu Manchu f-7

by Sax Rohmer

  CHAPTER 7

  LASH MARKS

  “I quite understand, Sir Denis,” Dr. Norton said. “Please regard any information I can give you as yours. I venture to believe you are wrong in supposing that Miss Demuras was an associate of this group, to which you refer, but I am entirely at your disposal. I will admit here and now, that I was growing infatuated with my patient. Her death, which I had not anticipated, was a severe blow.”

  Nayland Smith walked up and down, tugging at the lobe of his ear, glancing at the titles of the books, staring about the room; then:

  “I suggest that Miss Demuras’s eyes were long, narrow and very beautiful?”

  “Very beautiful.”

  “Of a most unusual green colour, at times glittering like emeralds?”

  “It occurs to me that you were acquainted with her?” said Dr. Norton, staring hard at the speaker.

  “It occurs to me,” Nayland Smith replied grimly, glancing at Alan Sterling, “that both Mr. Sterling and I from time to time have come in contact with Miss Demuras! Do you agree, Sterling?”

  The young American botanist fixed a pathetically eager gaze upon the face of Nayland Smith; it was taut, grim, a fighting glint in deep-set eyes.

  “My God! The net’s closing in on us again!” he whispered. “You seem to have an extra sense, Sir Denis, where this man and his people are concerned. It’s uncanny . . . but it may be a coincidence.”

  Inspector Gallaho had resumed his favourite pose. He was leaning on the mantleshelf, moving his thin-lipped mouth as if chewing phantom gum. He was out of his depth, but nothing in his expression revealed the fact.

  “I suggest that Miss Demuras was tall, and very slender?” Nayland Smith continued. “She had exquisite hands, slenderfingered and indolent—patrician hands with long, narrow, almond nails, highly varnished?”

  “You are right. I see you knew her.”

  “Her voice was very soothing—almost hypnotic?”

  Dr. Norton started violently, and stood up.

  “This is either clairvoyance,” he declared, “or you knew her better than I knew her. The implication is that Demuras is not her real name. Don’t tell me that she was a criminal. . . .”

  “There still remains a margin of doubt,” said Nayland Smith, rapidly. He suddenly turned and stared at Sterling. “I have just recalled something that you told me—something that you witnessed in Ste. Claire de la Roche. . . . When the Chinese punish, they punish severely. There’s just a chance.”

  He twisted about again, facing Dr. Norton. But the latter had construed the meaning of his words. His sanguine colour had ebbed; he was become pale.

  “Ah!” cried Nayland Smith. “I see that you understand me!”

  Norton nodded, and dropped back into his chair.

  “There is no further room for doubt,” he acknowledged. “Whoever my patient was, clearly you knew her. Throughout the time that I attended her, nearly two weeks, she defiantly declined to permit me to make a detailed examination. By which I mean that she objected to exposing her shoulders. In this she was adamant. My curiosity was keenly aroused. She had no other physical reticences. Indeed her mode of dress and her carriage, might almost be described as provocative. But she would never permit me to apply my stethoscope to her back. By means of a trick, as I frankly confess, and which need not be described, I succeeded in obtaining a glimpse of her bare shoulders. She was unaware of this. . . .”

  He paused, looking from face to face. He was beginning to regain his naturally fresh colour. He was beginning to realize that his beautiful patient had not been what she seemed.

  “There were great weals on her delicate skin—healed, but the scars were still visible. At some time, and not so long ago, she had been lashed—mercilessly lashed.”

  He clenched his fists, staring up at Nayland Smith.

  The latter nodded, and resumed his restless promenade of the carpet; then:

  “Do you understand, Sterling?” he snapped.

  Sterling was up—his restlessness was feverish.

  “I understand that Fah Lo Suee is dead—that she died alone, in that flat.”

  “Dead!”

  “Sir Denis!” Dr. Norton stood up. “I have been frank with you: be equally frank with me. Who was this woman?”

  “I don’t know her real name,” Nayland Smith replied, “but she is known as Fah Lo Suee. She is the daughter of Dr. Fu Manchu.”

  “What!”

  “And it was he, her father, who exercising his parental prerogative left the scars to which you refer.”

  “My God!” groaned Dr. Norton—”the fiend!—the merciless fiend! A delicate, tenderly nurtured woman!—and an ailing woman at that!”

  “Possibly,” snapped Nayland Smith. “Delicately nurtured— yes. I am anxious, doctor, to protect your professional reputation. Your certificate was given in good faith. There is no man on the Register who would not have done the same in the circumstances. Of this I assure you. But——” he paused—”I must have a glimpse of the body of your patient.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it can be arranged, sir,” growled Gallaho. “I put a few inquiries through this evening after Mr. Sterling ‘phoned me at the Yard, and I found that the deceased lady has been buried in a family vault in the old part of the Catholic Cemetery.”

  “That is correct,” Dr. Norton interrupted. “Her only surviving relative, a brother, Manoel Demuras, with whom she had requested the nurse to get into communication, came from Lisbon, as I understand, and the somewhat hurried funeral was due to his time being limited.”

  “Can you describe this man?” snapped Nayland Smith.

  “His ugliness was almost as noticeable as his sister’s beauty. The yellow streak was very marked.”

  “You mean he might almost have passed for a Chinaman?”

  “Not a Chinaman. . . .” Dr. Norton stroked his moustache and stared up at the ceiling. “But perhaps a native of Burma—or at least, as I should picture a native of Burma to look.”

  “There was Eastern blood of some sort in the Demurases,” growled Gallaho. “They settled in London nearly a century ago, and at one time had a very big business as importers of Madeira wine. The firm has been extinct for twenty years. But there’s a family vault in the old Catholic Cemetery, and that’s where the body lies.”

  “I see.”

  And thereupon Nayland Smith did a singular thing. . . .

  Crossing the room, he jerked a curtain aside, and threw up the window!

  All watched him in mute astonishment. Waves of fog crept in, like the tentacles of some shadowy octopus. He was staring down in the direction of the street. He turned, reclosed the window and readjusted the curtain.

  “Forgive me, Doctor,” he said, smiling; and that rare smile, breaking through the grim mask, almost resembled the smile of an embarrassed schoolboy. “A liberty, I admit. But I had a sudden idea—and I was right.”

  “What?” growled Gallaho, ceasing the chewing operation, and shooting out his jaw.

  “We’ve been followed. Somebody is watching the house. . . .”

  CHAPTER 8

  FOG IN HIGH PLACES

  That phenomenal fog was getting its grip upon London again when the party set out. But in the specially equipped car, fair headway was made. At the mysterious, deserted house of Professor Ambrose, Gallaho and Sterling were dropped. The detective had certain important inquiries to make there relative to the accessibility of the adjoining ground-floor flat from the studio of Pietro Ambrose. Nayland Smith went on alone.

  He had established contact by telephone from Dr. Norton’s house with the man he was going to see. He knew this man, his lack of imagination, his oblique views of life. He knew that the task before him was no easy one. But he had attempted and achieved tasks that were harder.

  The slow progress of the car was all but unendurable. Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably, peering out first from one window, then from another. In the brightly lighted West End streets bette
r going was made, and at last the car pulled up before a gloomy, stone-porched house a few paces from Berkeley Square.

  In a coldly forbidding library, a man sat behind a vast writing-table. Its appointments were frigidly correct. His white tie, for he was in evening dress, was a miracle of correctness. He did not stand up as Sir Denis was shown in by a butler whose proper occupation was that of an undertaker.

  “Ah! Smith.” He nodded and pointed to an armchair.

  “Just in time.” He glanced at a large marble clock. “I only have five minutes.”

  Nayland Smith’s nod was equally curt.

  “Good evening, Sir Harold,” he returned, and sat down in the hard, leather-covered chair.

  Sir Denis Nayland Smith’s relations with His Majesty’s Secretary for Home Affairs had never been cordial. Indeed it is doubtful if Sir Harold Sims, in the whole course of his life, had ever known either friendship or love. Nayland Smith, staring at the melancholy face with its habitual expression of shocked surprise, thought that Sir Harold’s scanty hair bore a certain resemblance to red tape chopped up. From a pocket of his tweed suit, Nayland Smith took out several documents, opened them, glanced at them, and then, standing up, placed them on the large, green blotting pad before Sir Harold Sims.

  “You know,” said the latter, adjusting a pair of spectacles, and glancing down at the papers, “your methods have always been too fantastic for me, Smith. I mean, they were when you were associated with the Criminal Investigation Department. This thing, which you are asking me to do, is irregular— wholly irregular.”

  Nayland Smith returned to the armchair. A man of vision and dynamic energy, he always experienced, in the proximity of Sir Harold Sims, an all but unconquerable urge to pick up His Majesty’s Secretary and to shake him until his teeth rattled.

  “There are times, Sir Harold,” he said, quietly, “when one can afford to dispense with formalities. In this case, your consent is necessary; hence my intrusion.”

  “You know—” Sims was scanning the documents suspiciously—”this bugbear of yours, this obsession with the person known as Fu Manchu, has created a lot of unpleasant feeling.”

  This was no more than a statement of fact. Sir Denis’s retirement from the Metropolitan Police had coincided fairly closely with the appointment of Sir Harold to the portfolio which he still held.

  “You may term it an obsession if you like—perhaps it is. But you are fully aware, Sir Harold, of the extent of my authority. I am not alone in this obsession. The most dangerous man living in the world to-day is here, in England, and likely to slip through our fingers. Any delay is dangerous.”

  Sir Harold nodded, setting one document aside and beginning to read another.

  “I shall be bothered by the Roman Catholic authorities,” he murmured; “you know how troublesome they can be. If you could give me two or three days, in order that the matter might be regularised. . . .”

  “It is to-night, or never,” snapped Nayland Smith, suddenly standing up.

  “Really. . . .”

  Sir Harold began to shake his head again.

  “It is perhaps unfair of me to remind you that I can bring pressure to bear.”

  Sir Harold looked up.

  “You are not suggesting that you would bother the Prime Minister with this trivial but complicated affair?” he asked pathetically.

  I am suggesting nothing. I only ask for your signature. I should not be here if the matter were as trivial as you suppose.”

  “Really—really, Smith. . . .”

  The light-blue eyes peering through spectacle lens were caught and arrested by the gaze of eyes deep-set, steely and penetrating. Sir Harold hated this man’s driving power— hated his hectoring manner, the force of a personality which brooked no denial. . . .

  Five minutes later the police car was stealing through a mist, yellow, stifling, which closed in remorselessly, throttling London.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE TOMB OF THE DEMURASES

  “You are sure there is no other means of access to the cemetery?”

  “Quite, sir.”

  The quavering voice of the old attendant was in harmony with his venerable but wretched appearance. He seemed to belong to the clammy mist; to the phantom monuments which peered through it. He might have been an exhalation from one of the ancient tombs. His straggling grey beard, his watery, nearly sightless eyes, his rusty black garb. A mental vision of Fleurette appeared before Alan Sterling—young, tall, divinely vigorous, an exquisite figure of health and beauty; yet perhaps she lay here, stricken down inscrutably in the bloom and fullness of spring, whilst such shadowy, unhappy beings as this old mortuary keeper survived, sadly watching each fallen bud returning to earth, our common mother, who gives us life, in whose arms we sleep.

  “I’ve got men at both gates, sir,” Gallaho growled, “and two more patrolling. Anybody suspicious, they have orders to hold. A rather queer thing has been reported: may have no bearing on the case, but——”

  “What?” Nayland Smith asked.

  “A small head-stone has been stolen!”

  “A small head-stone?”

  “Yes, Sir Denis. From a child’s grave. Seems a useless sort of theft, doesn’t it?”

  “Possibly not!” he snapped. “I’m glad you mentioned this, Inspector.”

  He nodded to the old man.

  A dim light shone out from the door of the lodge. It was difficult to imagine the domestic life of this strange creature whose home was amongst sepulchres; all but impossible to believe that he knew anything of human happiness; that joy had ever visited that ghastly habitation.

  “Mr. Roberts?”

  A young man wearing a dark, waisted overcoat an a muffler conceived in Eton colours, stepped languidly forward out of veiling mists. He wore a soft black hat of most fashionable shape; his small, aristocratic features registered intense boredom. From a pocket of his overcoat he produced a number of documents, and handed them to the old man, gingerly, as if offering a fish to a seal.

  “Everything is in order,” he said; “you need not trouble to look them over.”

  “There’s no need to waste time,” growled Gallaho. “Let’s have the key.” He raised his voice. “Dorchester!” he shouted.

  A uniformed constable appeared, carrying a leather bag, as:

  “I suppose it’s all right,” quivered the old mortuary keeper, looking down blindly at the papers in his hand. “But I shall have to enter it all up, you know.”

  “You can do that while we’re on the job,” said Gallaho. “The keys.”

  When, presently, led by a constable carrying a red lantern they proceeded in silence along a narrow path around which ghostly monuments clustered, it might have been noted, save that the light was poor, that Mr. Roberts, Sir Harold Sims’ representative, looked unusually pale. To the left they turned, along another avenue of tombs, and then to the right again, presently penetrating to the oldest part of the cemetery. Grey and awesome, fronted by sentinel cypress trees, ill-nourished and drooping, a building resembling a small chapel loomed out of the fog. There was a little grassy forecourt fronted by iron railings, and a stained glass window right and left of a massive teak door intricately studded with iron nails. A constable in plain clothes was standing there.

  “This is the Demuras vault, sir,” he reported.

  The company pulled up and stood for a moment looking at the building. Despite the chill of the night, Alan Sterling became aware of the fact that perspiration was trickling down his ribs. He glanced at Gallaho who held a bunch of keys in his hand, one separated from the others. The pugnacious face of the detective registered no emotion whatever. Nayland Smith turned to the plain clothes officer, and:

  “There may be someone hiding among the monuments,” he said, sharply. “You have seen nothing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “If you see or hear anything, while we are inside—sing out, and do your best to make a capture.”

  “Very good, sir; you can le
ave it to me.”

  “Go ahead, Gallaho.”

  Gallaho opened the little gate, which was not locked, and advanced up three steps to the massive teak door. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it. It was very stiff; it creaked dismally, but responded—and the detective pushed the door open. . . .

  When at last the party stood in the vault of the Demuras, dimly lighted by two police lamps and a red lantern, the fog had entered behind them, touching every man with phantom fingers. The dweller amongst the tombs arrived, belated, coming down the stone steps pantingly, and seeming a fitting occupant of this ghastly place.

  “I understand,” snapped Nayland Smith, “that this is the one we want.” He pointed, then turned to Mr. Roberts. “Is it quite in accordance with the wishes of the Home Office that I should open this shell?”

  Mr. Roberts drew a handkerchief from an inner pocket and delicately wiped his forehead. He had removed his black hat.

  “Quite all right, Sir Denis. This is really rather distressing.”

  “I am sorry, but much is at stake.”

  Constable Dorchester came forward. He had discarded his helmet, revealing a closely cropped head of brilliantly red and vigorously upstanding hair. His hazel eyes glittered excitedly.

  “Shall I start, sir?”

  “Yes, carry on . . .”

  Inspector Gallaho, twirling his wide-brimmed bowler in stubby muscular hands, chewed phantom gum. The old sexton stood at the foot of the steps in an attitude which might have been that of prayer. Alan Sterling turned aside, looking anywhere but at the new and brightly polished sarcophagus which had been removed from its niche and which might contain . . .